


Rodney's Nightmares

by Salchat



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Banter, Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Nightmares, Pining, Snark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:46:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28813647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Salchat/pseuds/Salchat
Summary: John is away and Rodney is having nightmares.
Relationships: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Comments: 13
Kudos: 47





	Rodney's Nightmares

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Readers,  
> Just before Christmas I had a run of horrible but entertainingly varied nightmares. So, obviously, I thought 'Aha! They will make excellent Rodney-fuel!' and made sure to write them down each morning (or sometimes the middle of the night) before I forgot their true impact! I think they work well translated into Rodney-isms and I hope you enjoy the resulting story.  
> Salchat

The first night John was away, Rodney's dreams were full of formless existential terror, which he didn't think worth the effort of describing to Zelenka. In any case, although Rodney felt unsettled and more than usually tetchy, his colleague didn't seem to notice.

On the second night, his old recurring nightmare made an appearance, the one where none of the light switches worked and he was left in the dark. It had terrified him as a child - these were things that you should be able to rely on, like gravity, the turn of the planet from day to night and so on. As he’d grown older he’d tried taking the dream switches apart but could never find any break in the circuit or any excuse for the electrons not to flow freely and illuminate his shadowy threatening world in which unknown terrors lurked.

The third night he found himself simply walking along a street, but the sidewalk was wet with dark inky blue paint that splashed as he walked, staining him indelibly, clothing and skin alike, so that everyone would see, everyone would know. What they would know, Rodney wasn’t sure, but it was something of huge significance that they shouldn’t ever, ever suspect. He walked in the road instead, risking his life amongst the rush and surge of the traffic, but he still got stained.

On the fourth night he got so little sleep that as soon as he reached his lab, having foregone the pleasures of the mess hall, he desperately gulped three mugs of extra hot, extra strong coffee in quick succession.

Zelenka sat down next to him. “What is wrong, Rodney?”

“What? Nothing! Nothing’s wrong!” Rodney’s nerves snapped with caffeine and brittleness.

“Do you know when he’ll be back? The Colonel?”

“What? What’s Sheppard got to do with anything?” He downed some more coffee, slopping it on the surface of the bench and smearing the spillage with his sleeve.

“Rodney.” Zelenka’s hand stilled the movements of his arm. “I am your friend, you know this. Talk to me.”

“Oh. Yes, well, hmm.” He lifted the mug, but it was empty. “I’ve, er, I’ve just been having a few nightmares, that’s all.”

“You are not sleeping well?”

“I just said that, didn’t I? Honestly, what’s the point in talking if you don’t listen!” More coffee. He needed more coffee. Rodney got up and refilled his mug from the machine.

“Maybe you shouldn’t -”

“Yes! I should!”

Zelenka made a pacifying gesture with his hands.

Rodney sat down at the bench. His colleague didn’t move. He gave a long, puffing sigh, letting his lips flap around, to show that he didn't really need to talk and was annoyed by the whole thing.

“Okay, so it’s getting worse each night and I wake up feeling worse than when I went to sleep, so I'm not sure there’s any point anymore - trying to sleep at all. I mean, maybe I can just keep going until I pass out or something. I wouldn’t have nightmares if I was actually unconscious would I?”

Zelenka shrugged. “I do not know, Rodney. It doesn’t sound like a good solution to me. Tell me about these nightmares. What did you dream about last night?”

Images sprang into Rodney’s head together with a shuddering sense of jeopardy and humiliation. “I was back at school, in gym class, wearing those stupid shorts we used to wear.”

Zelenka hummed encouragement.

“Only it was worse than any gym class I ever went to, if that’s possible.” The images were still sharp in Rodney’s mind. “It was like an obstacle course. We, no, in fact it was just me, _I_ had to climb over these massive blocks of concrete, you know like when a building’s been demolished; big lumps with jagged edges and bits of rebar sticking out - sharp, rusty bits of rebar so that if they don’t actually impale you right through, you’ll die of some horrible disease anyway, just from a scratch!”

“That sounds very frightening.”

“It was! It was terrifying! There was no thought for health and safety at all!"

Zelenka took a breath and then rubbed his nose. He took another breath and then straightened his glasses. He took another breath.

“For God’s sake, just spit it out, Radek!”

“Give me a chance! You’re not so easy to say these things to, Rodney.”

“I think you’ll find I’m an extremely open, non-judgemental kind of man actually.”

Zelenka snorted.

Rodney drew himself up with affronted dignity.

His colleague’s inappropriate smirk fell away. “You really meant that, didn’t you? I thought you were making a joke.”

Rodney huffed. “Teyla says I’m not as critical as I used to be and she’s good at that kind of thing - being nice to people, knowing what to say and so on.”

“She is very kind and… generous.”

“I suppose by that you mean she’s lying to me. Well that’s all you know. I don’t think Athosians can lie. They’re like Vulcans in that respect.” Seeing a raft of contradictions and counter-arguments about to spew forth from Zelenka’s lips, backed up by chapter and verse of Star Trek fanlore (the original and subsequent series), Rodney diverted the flow. “What were you going to say? About my nightmares?”

“Just that you’re not used to sleeping alone now, and that maybe you feel - how shall I say? - insecure without the Colonel.”

“Hmph. Well, I’m not surprised you didn’t want to say that, Radek. I managed perfectly well for the first nearly forty years of my life, so I don’t think that can be the case.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Manage. Perfectly well.”

“Of course I did!” Rodney slapped down his memories of sleeping pills, night terrors, too much coffee and adrenaline and all sorts of other unhelpful items that suddenly wanted to thrust themselves into his attention. “I’m a grown man. I don’t need some floppy-haired, pointy-eared, Colonel-shaped teddy bear substitute to cling to in the night, thank you very much!”

“Oh,” said Zelenka, the syllable loaded with disbelief and contradiction.

Rodney huffed and flapped his hands. “Go away. Get on with your fascinating adjustments to the ventilation system or whatever it was you were doing.”

Zelenka silently took himself off and Rodney forced his distracted intellect down into the deep complexity of his work. He was wrong. Radek was definitely wrong. Yes, Rodney was with John now (and it was even semi-official in the way that people knew stuff and then mostly pretended they didn’t), but he could still manage on his own perfectly well, thank you. He was the best physicist in two galaxies, after all, capable of meshing Earth technology with whatever tangled alien illogicality you cared to name and damn well making it work through sheer force of personality. If alien technology were sentient (and some of it probably was), it would run from him as fast as its little legs could carry it; but he’d catch it and flail at it with his whip-like mind until it rolled over, sat up and begged, and generally abased itself before him.

Rodney smirked and laughed under his breath.

“Rodney!”

“What? Don’t interrupt my train of thought!”

“You were doing your evil genius laugh again.”

“Oh.”

“You told me to stop you if you showed signs of becoming a villainous overlord out to establish intergalactic domination with your hordes of super robots.”

“I only laughed.”

“Yes, but from small acorns…”

“Hmph. Fair enough, I suppose.”

oOo

That night it was worse than ever.

Rodney found himself wandering through a crowded country fair. It was dark and he was alone again, and even if Sheppard had been present, there was no ferris wheel, or indeed any other hair-raising ride. Not to mention the fact that hair-raisingness was redundant in Sheppard’s case, because his hair was raised quite enough already. 

It was the kind of fair where people sit on hay bales and watch farmers wrestle with each other for prizes; if farmers even did that, which in Rodney’s head apparently they did - sweatily and with much grunting and many displays of roaring testosterone. 

Rodney didn't stop at the wrestling ring, but wandered past. There must be deep fried and/or sugary snacks somewhere about. He was carrying a blue hold-all, and kept glancing down to check the precious contents, which included several treasured possessions, including his trophy that he’d won at a Sears drama festival.

Inevitably at such a primitive outdoor entertainment, Rodney needed the bathroom, but there were only those terrifyingly unhygienic portable cubicles with the nasty chemical flushes and, what’s more, even though there was a whole row of them, they all appeared to be occupied. There were no shadowy hedges that he might discreetly retire behind, so Rodney dragged his increasingly heavy holdall down the line of the squalid little huts, past door after locked door, all displaying a little red triangle to taunt him with his increasingly urgent need.

Then, at the end of the row there was a particularly ramshackle construction with a door that came nowhere near the ground and nowhere near the top of the frame, thus helpfully displaying its vacancy. Rodney went in, and immediately there sprang into being a crowd of jeering teenagers standing in line outside, able to see almost all of him both above and below the paltry excuse for a door.

Then the humiliations came thick and fast. The plumbing erupted in a shower of filthy water, spraying him from head to toe, the door fell off the cubicle exposing him to the ridicule of the raucous teens, and said teens promptly snatched at the items in his tumbling hold-all and made off with his precious trophy, but only after exchanging it for a can of soda, well shaken up and with the ring-pull half off, so that the remaining contents were drenched with sticky orange liquid.

He woke up, slapped at the switch on his nightstand and was sitting, bolt upright on the side of the bed before he was even aware that he’d moved.

“What the hell was that?” Rodney demanded of the empty room.

He reached out for his glass of water with a shaking hand. He took a sip and the glass rattled against his teeth. There was a hard, tight, painful lump in his chest and he rubbed at his breastbone, thoughts scuttling like frightened rabbits through his head - disease and tumours and his body giving him nightmares in a crazy semaphore, to presage his imminent demise.

“Get a grip, McKay,” he said, in his best Sheppard voice.

His eyes fell on a black shape on the floor, hurled and abandoned in the vague direction of the laundry basket's former location before he and John rearranged the room to fit their things in more effectively. It was that old long-sleeved shirt of John's - the one with the zipper that had snags and rough patches all over the once-smooth fabric. Rodney wouldn't let him get rid of it because of its associated memories.

The first time he'd seen John wearing it was not long after they'd arrived on Atlantis. Fortunately, Rodney had been holding a cheese sandwich when the encounter had taken place, so that any drooling from one side of his suddenly slack mouth could be accounted for by lust for delicious starchy fattiness rather than lust for his colleague's long-armed, smoothly slim bendiness, or the way the fabric clung so that he could see the curve of John's pecs and the small shadows created by his nipples. Although it might have saved a good deal of time and misunderstanding had he drooled, simply and openly and with obvious, lustful intent. No, it wouldn't though, because Sheppard was one of the most oblivious people on any planet when it came to lustful looks cast in his direction.

Rodney got up, picked up the shirt, pressed the rumpled fabric into his face and inhaled.

Who was he trying to kid? It didn't even matter who - himself, Zelenka, any one of the several hundred members of the expedition - nobody would be fooled. 

Rodney missed John. He missed him like crazy, like you'd miss… He didn't know what he'd miss in the same way as he missed John. People would say 'like an arm or a leg,' but that didn't work because the absence of a limb would be about blindingly frustrating practicality, like how did you type and eat and hold a coffee cup at the same time? Whereas John's absence was more a lack of warmth and light and his unique animal presence. It was more like having all the blankets whipped suddenly off your bed and being instantly transported to a Wraith holding cell.

Or being a stranger, alone at a country fair, the object of squalid misfortune and ridicule.

Oh, well. John would be done with his review in a few days, as well as the legal family stuff his brother wanted him for. And then he'd be back and they could pick up where they'd left off when they'd just returned from Crazy-fluffy Sheep-cow World carrying stinky gifted dairy products and with the promise of plenty more.

John would be back, the nightmares would fly off to their dark world of gym classes and exploding bathrooms, and the status quo of Sheppardful bliss would resume. He'd have to find a way of avoiding smug, told-you-so looks from Zelenka, though. Maybe he'd be extra pissy in the few days after John returned and make up some abjectly horror-filled nightmares just to prove Sheppard had nothing to do with his equilibrium. Even though he did.

oOo

The following night he dreamt that giant furry mice had eaten holes in everything, including his laptop, his furniture and even his orthopaedic, prescription mattress. They flitted about his quarters squeaking merrily, their golden pelts flashing in the light from the nightstand. He was an irrelevance to those mice. He wasn't even in their way. They just didn't care, carrying on in their happy path of destruction as he stood, forlorn, unable to go back to his Swiss cheese-like bed.

The next night he was on rollerskates, wheeling crazily, suicidally even, across lanes and lanes of speeding traffic. He paused on the central reservation, surrounded by noise and buffeted by the slipstreams of thundering vehicles, and then plunged back into the mass, his skates juddering and grinding on the harsh concrete, just as his body would soon judder and grind beneath the wheels of the oncoming vehicles.

This was followed up, on the next night, by the equally obnoxious noise and buffeting of a large dream-family with lots of small, screaming, sticky children, invading his quarters in the middle of the night, shaking and bouncing and, for God's sake, _jollying_ him awake and then demanding that he be cheerful and sociable. Rodney decided he preferred the terrors of the freeway on rollerskates.

Two more nights, Rodney said to himself as the grey dawn light crept between the Atlantean towers and tip-toed tentatively in through his drapes. Just two more nights and then John would be back.

Rodney hugged himself, imagining those long, Sheppardy arms wrapped around him, the scratchy, hairy chest pressed to his own, and all the knobbly, bonily angled bits of John's body which dug into him unexpectedly, giving him an opportunity to maintain his grumpy persona even in the face of extreme snuggliness.

Two more nights.

oOo

One more night, one more night. Rodney muttered it under his breath as he entered his cluttered lair the following morning.

He caught a flicker of movement as a Zelenka-shaped blur hastily ducked down behind a large artifact-thing, which might constitute either the answer to life, the universe and everything or possibly a trouser press.

"You might as well come out. I know you're there," he snapped.

Zelenka's halo of disarranged fluff emerged first, followed by his glasses, behind which his eyes were large, round and scared. "I know you know I'm here," he said, a nervous smile flickering across his face and then slithering away from the downturned corners of his lips. "But I thought you might want to pretend you didn't know I know you know."

"But I do know you know I… Oh forget it!" Rodney plonked himself down at his workbench and shoved his keyboard and a litter of power bar wrappers out of the way to make some elbow space. He drooped over the surface, head in hands, his fingers writhing through his hair, massaging phantom pains which flickered like an aurora over his tense scalp.

A stool scraped and creaked.

"Go 'way, Radek."

"No, I will not go away. Rodney… it crosses my mind that you haven't been eating properly and perhaps your nightmares are caused by -"

"I've been eating just fine," snapped Rodney. "Better than usual. I haven't been as hungry. For heaven's sake, I chose a salad last night over mac and cheese!"

"But you love macaroni cheese, Rodney!"

"Yes, and if _that_ isn't a symptom of there being something very wrong with my whole metabolism, psyche, call-it-what-you-will, I don't know what is!"

There was a sympathetic tut and a sigh. Rodney remained hunched, the heels of his hands digging into his temples.

"Do you want to tell me…?"

Rodney sat up abruptly and spun round. Something clicked angrily in his back, so that was another thing to worry about. "The latest installment in my nocturnal unravelling? Yes, I'll tell you - and you just see if you can find any humour whatsoever in this little scenario!" He sniffed and ran one hand through his rumpled hair. "Oh, it all started off very nicey-nice," he said, with contempt. "A concert hall and me dressed in my finest, mingling with a well-behaved crowd of apparently civilized people."

Radek gave an indeterminate squeak, which was a good move on his part because Rodney was itching for an excuse to yell.

"And then this guy comes up to me and says, 'Come on, they're waiting for you!' 'For me?' I question, like a poor innocent. 'Yes, he responds. And you need to be on your toes - they're savage out there tonight!'”

"And suddenly I'm in the wings, peeping round the curtain to see a grand piano on the stage and a huge hall, filled with all the McKay-haters of both galaxies, and that encompasses a lot of people, let me tell you! You don't get to be the one and only Meredith Rodney McKay PhD PhD etc. without pissing off a fair few egos along the way."

Radek creaked like an old door in an attempt to remain sympathetic.

Rodney ignored him. "So, I think, 'Okay, maybe I can do this - my fingers remember a tune or two.'" He flexed said digits in demonstration. "But then I can hear an orchestra tuning up and the faceless dream-idiot's babbling about Mozart, and I'm being shoved out onto the stage."

Radek began a doubtful syllable.

"Oh, yes, I know what you're going to say!" He pointed accusingly at his colleague. "'Mozart? Huh! A few scales and a pretty tune here and there - how hard can it be?'"

Zelenka shook his head in denial, but it was obvious what he'd been thinking, the deluded fool.

"There's nowhere to hide in a Mozart piano concerto, Radek! Nowhere. To. Hide! You might as well be pinned to a rock with your guts exposed to pecking crows or eagles or whatever savage birds are the equivalent of your old piano teacher and an assortment of murderous colleagues, Genii and Wraith!" Rodney wiped moisture from the corner of his mouth. "You can get away with a bit of fudging, a bit of blustering in a Rachmaninoff or a Shostakovich, but Mozart? Crystal clarity! Every note with spot-on, pinpoint, laser-sights accuracy or you are going down! Going. Down!" His vibrating finger jabbed Radek in the chest and, in case that wasn't emphatic enough he leant forward and whispered: "In. Flames."

Zelenka's mouth opened and closed several times. He rubbed his chest. "Colonel Sheppard will be home tomorrow," he squeaked.

Rodney huffed a deep, can't-be-bothered-to-deny-it sigh and turned back to his bench. "Yes. Tomorrow." A monitor winked at him in a cheery, over-eager, bend-me-to-your-genius kind of way. "And he's never leaving me alone again. Ever." 

Technology could be employed to that effect, Rodney thought, but didn't say, in case Radek put the idea under the heading of 'villainous overlord'.

oOo

Rodney had had a brief, passing word with one of the geologists that day. The man hadn’t been around long, (and wouldn’t be around much longer if Rodney had anything to do with it) but even so, his attempt to beat his superior to the lunch queue and thereby lay claim to the very last piece of chocolate-substitute brownie, had been foolhardy at best. Having revealed to the miserable excuse for a scientist the error of his ways, in a very few, pithy sentences, Rodney had forgotten the whole incident.

The geologist, had he known it, had his revenge in the form of a nightmare of epic proportions. Rodney found himself standing on a blasted plain, its surface marred by shattered slabs of rock, pointing in accusing angles toward a blood-red sky. In the distance loomed a huge, black mountain, streaked with the tell-tale trails of glowing magma. Rodney wondered if he was in Mordor and was about to look about him for signs of the Dark Tower, when he stopped caring about such trivialities in the face of his own certain, inescapably imminent demise.

There were two, count them, two pyroclastic flows, churning, hurtling and roiling toward him across the plain, on a converging course, which wasn’t even a logical approach to his destruction, bearing in mind they must both have come from the same volcano.

“You should fan out!” he yelled at them, waving his arms.

They didn’t listen.

Rodney awoke with a whimper, tangled in his damp sheets, but his whimper quickly morphed into a smirking bark of triumph. “Ha! Take that, nightmares!” His still-shaking hand curled into a fist and was duly pumped. “Today’s the day! Welcome back, Colonel John Sheppard and welcome back nights of peaceful slumber!”

He prepared for the hero’s return, changing the bedding (again), picking up most of the debris on the floor and relegating a surprisingly small litter of power bar wrappers to the trash. He prepared himself, showering and shaving with extra care and pondering on the delights that might be in store for a sex-starved physicist at the hands of an equally sex-starved Colonel of the speak-no-evil-about-such-things Air Force.

He breezed through his day’s tasks and, when the clock rolled around toward the time for Earth’s dial-in and John’s return, he stood up to tell Zelenka he was quitting for the day.

Then one of the minions came marauding into his space, arms waving, hair flying, telling of doom and disaster, and it took him a whole ten minutes (and really was a ten-minute challenge even worthy of the name?) to save the entire city, if not planet, so that then he was late.

He puffed and huffed his way along the not-marble-but-hey-who’s-counting halls, fingers and eyes snapping at anyone who dared even look like they were thinking of getting in his way, or worse, approaching him. When he reached the Gateroom, the Gate was active, John had already embarked on a series of lop-sided slouches which told just how relieved he was to be out from under the eye of Air Force authority, and Woolsey was about to greet him.

“Ah, Colonel -”

“Out of my way! Coming through!” Rodney grabbed the front of John’s shirt in a determined fist. “You can have him later. No, tomorrow. Maybe. Or the next day.”

“Hey, Rodney,” John drawled.

“Yes, yes, we know you’re incredibly cool and devastatingly attractive. Come on!” He turned and began towing John behind him. “I need Colonel Sheppard for some very important, er, research… into a crucial piece of Ancient -” Rodney skidded to a halt. “Oh, who am I trying to kid? We’re going to have sex,” he announced, in a carrying voice. “Lots and lots of hugely inventive, hugely satisfying, science-meets-military sex! Is that clear?” He tipped his head back to regard the faces at the rail of the control level. “Is there anyone up there who didn’t get that? Chuck? Amelia? No?”

A chorus of suppressed sniggers and mumbles indicated the Gate techs’ full understanding.

“Good!” said Rodney.

oOo

“Mission accomplished?” asked Rodney, with a satiated stretch of deliciously over-worked muscles.

“Yeah, I got plenty,” replied John, setting a piled tray down on the nightstand.

“You were ages,” complained Rodney.

“Couldn’t get away.” John bounced down onto the bed, a handful of fries disappearing into his mouth. “Sanchez is having trouble with kitchen security.”

“What, that scary Master Sergeant? Someone’s been stealing the dragon's stock of innocent maidens?”

“She’s not that bad.”

“Yes, she is,” said Rodney. “Stop hogging all the fries.”

“Jeez, Rodney, if anyone’s the hog… Ow.” John rubbed his arm.

“I didn’t say _you_ were a hog - I carefully used the verb-form to avoid insulting you.”

“Oh. Huh.” John poked at the bulging sides of a hamburger in an attempt to force the contents back into place. He picked it up in two hands and took a large bite. A slice of pickle fell out onto his lap. Rodney picked it up and ate it. “So,” John said, out of the side of his bulging mouth, “d’you miss me?”

Rodney, fighting with his own hamburger, quickly took a huge bite, so that he wouldn’t have to respond.

John paused, chewed rapidly and swallowed. “What’s up?”

Rodney made a face indicative of the importance of savouring his mouthful.

“C’mon, McKay. Tell me.”

He began an abortive attempt to reply, choked, coughed, chewed and put down his burger. “Oh, well, um, I may have had a bit of trouble sleeping. While you were away.” He stared down at the remains of his meal. Would John go for smug satisfaction at his own indispensability or maybe just a reassuring arm punch?

“Uh, yeah, me too, I guess.”

Rodney looked up. John had put down his own structurally unsound stack and was doing the back-of-the-neck rub he did when he was confused or emotionally challenged.

“Did you have nightmares?”

John shrugged. “Some.”

“Bad?”

“Some.”

Rodney sighed, relaxing further into the comforting monosyllables. “They’ll stop now, though.”

“Yeah,” said John.

Rodney resumed work on his hamburger. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“Me too.”

oOo

Rodney hurled back the duvet and sat bolt upright, shuddering with fear, his stomach churning. He breathed through his nose, his lips clamped tight, poised for flight to the bathroom.

“Rodney? What’s up?”

The floor was cold against his feet, the warmth of the bed radiated at his back. Rodney breathed, in and out, just breathed and breathed because he could and he was safe and he was free and he was with John and - “Oh, God!”

“Hey, it’s alright.”

There were two warm hands on his shoulders, squeezing gently, and a fluff of messy hair against the back of his neck. Rodney turned and buried himself in John's chest, breathing in his scent and warmth, allowing himself to be soothed by the nonsense murmurings of a man who didn't say stuff like that. Slowly his tremors began to subside, his body relaxed.

"Okay?"

"No," said Rodney. "No, I'm not. That was… that was the worst, that was just… awful." He reached out and switched on the light. The room sprang to golden familiarity, but Rodney still felt shadows clinging to his heart.

"Tell me."

"No."

"C'mon, Rodney. Tell me. It'll help."

"No. It won't. It was too real. Too awful."

"It wasn't real. You're here and I'm here and we're both fine."

"It was real. Not for me but for plenty of others. Millions of others..."

John's brows crunched together in question and concern.

"Look, all I'm going to say is this: it was historical, and as far as I know historically accurate. I - I was the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"What?"

Rodney closed his eyes. His throat ached and his voice emerged as a choked, hurried whisper. "I had a Star of David, pinned here. Right here." Rodney flapped a hand against his chest, over his heart.

"Oh."

"Yes, oh. And I know it was just a nightmare and I don't want to belittle what anyone really went through, but that was awful, just terrifyingly awful." The corners of his eyes prickled and he bit his lip hard. John shuffled closer, pressing right up against him and pulling him still closer with a wiry, hairy arm around his shoulders. "Why would I dream that? And why haven't they stopped? They were supposed to stop when you got back and you're back and they haven't stopped and now what do I do? Am I going crazy? What's wrong with me?"

"Hey, take it easy. Nothing's wrong with you, Rodney."

"Yes it is. It must be because -"

"No. It's not." John touched his cheek gently, his calloused fingers catching on Rodney’s stubble. The warm softness of his lips touched Rodney’s tight, downturned mouth.

"But -"

"You’ve been sleep-walking, Rodney.”

“What? I’ve -”

“I got up to go to the bathroom earlier, and when I came back you were gone.”

“I… I was?”

John nodded and ran his hand up and down Rodney’s back.

“Where did I go?”

“Well, I didn’t know _where_ you’d gone. I ducked out into the hall but there was no sign, so I cranked up your laptop and set a scan going for your tracker.”

“Oh. That was… efficient.”

“Yeah,” said John, kissing him again. “I can get stuff done when I’ve got an incentive.”

“So? Where was I?”

“Kitchens.”

“Oh. Oh no.”

“Oh yes, you’re Master Sergeant Sanchez’s mysterious thief.”

“Oh, God, I am so dead.”

“I’ll protect you.”

“Thanks. What did I eat? Rodney smacked his lips but could detect no taste other than a faint oily bitterness. “And how did I get in? That place is like Fort Knox.”

John squeezed and shoved him at the same time. “Come on, Rodney. You designed that system.”

“Oh. Of course I did. Hmm. And left a convenient back door just in case.”

“Yeah, and used it to get at the stuff we brought back from Dairy Planet.”

“What, those stinky cheeses from Crazy-fluffy Sheep-cow World? I’ve been eating them? Oh no. No, no, no, Carson’s not cleared them yet. He’s been culturing samples. He said he thinks they might be more use as a biological weapon or that maybe they’re an advanced life form in their own right because they’re starting to grow mould in fractals! Not to mention the fact that they stink to high heaven! Oh, no…”

“Oh, yes.”

“But, who would eat that? The mould, the smell… the - the ‘ooziness’?”

“Apparently you would, Rodney. And when I caught you up, you looked like you were having a party all by yourself - humming away, mouth full, happy as anything.”

“Humming?”

“Humming.”

“Uh, what…?”

John smirked.

“Tell me what I was humming!”

“Uh, well. It sounded pretty much like ‘Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds’ to me.”

“ _Dogtanian?_ ”

“And the three muskehounds.”

“ _‘One for all and all for one?’_ ”

“ _‘Muskehounds are always ready.’_ ”

“Oh, God. Why didn’t you stop me?”

“What, humming? Or eating?”

“Both.”

“Well, you’re not supposed to wake someone who’s sleepwalking. And it was kinda cute.” John turned Rodney, pulling him into his arms. “But I’m sorry I didn’t. If I’d known what would happen... I’m sorry I didn’t, Rodney.”

“That’s okay.” Rodney relaxed into the warm, soft-hard enfolding Sheppardiness. “It’s okay. No more sleep-walking for me, even if you have to tie me to the bed, which means no more evil alien cheese.”

"Which means no more nightmares," said John.

They got back into bed. Rodney rested his head on John’s chest and John stroked his hair slowly and rhythmically.

“So, were they all that bad?”

“What, the nightmares?” He grunted. “No. But pretty bad.”

“What were they about? You don’t have to tell me.”

“Oh, you know, stupid things. Being humiliated, having to do dangerous physical stuff, having my possessions taken away from me. Having to be someone I’m not.”

The arm around his back tightened and a kiss fell amongst his hair. “I don’t want you to be any different.”

“No. Neither do I.”

“And I won’t let anyone take stuff away from you.”

“No.” Rodney squirmed. “It was just dreams, though. I can defend myself really.”

“Of course you can. But I like the thought of fighting off your demons for you.”

“Good,” said Rodney. “You can take on Master Sergeant Dragon, then.”

“Oh.”

“Ha, not so keen now, are you?”

“Nah, I’ll say you were doing research. Or I’ll say I have a thing for cheese and you were saving me from myself.” John’s voice was slurred and drowsy.

“Taking one for the team,” said Rodney, his eyes drifting shut.

“Yeah, ‘cos your my hero,” said John.

“Taking a cheese for you, instead of a bullet.”

“Yeah.” John’s chest rose and fell slowly and deeply beneath Rodney’s head. “Somethin’ I won’t do for you, though,” he mumbled.

“Wha’s that?” 

“Let you name stuff.” John chuckled and Rodney’s lips jiggled slackly. “ _Crazy-fluffy Sheep-cow World._ ”

“Hmm,” said Rodney, wriggling his cheek against John’s hairiness. “Glad you’re back.”

“Me too,” said John.

"Love you."

"Me too."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading. Please leave comments and kudos, which make me very happy and may prevent future nightmares!
> 
> Oh, and if you don't know 'Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds', the theme tune is on Youtube. It has to be the longest ever kids cartoon theme and well worth humming while you're running a Gate diagnostic, or doing the washing up, or eating alien cheese.


End file.
